Contributors

Tuesday, 4 May 2010

Football fans: views on political parties

To follow the analysis conducted yesteday on MumsNet, we are going to analyse the views of football fans by visiting some of the more popular teams, who have discussion forums with a large number of comments on the election.

To start off, we are analysing the views of Liverpool football fans from a popular Liverpool fansite Red and White Kop. The culture of this football club (like many) is socialist and therefore we can expect a bias towards Labour from the traditional supporters of this football club.

To begin with then let's look at the views of Labour and what words are in context to Labour in the online comments. The figure below shows the words that are found in context with Labour. The closer the word is to the centre (i.e. the closer to the word Labour) then the closer the word is in context.

It is interesting to note that there are not many positive words coming through this analysis. The closest words in context are the other parties which means that discussions of Labour are also bringing in mention of the other parties. There is discussion of a hung parliament plus negative words such as 'bad', 'years'. There are also positive words such as 'win' and 'majority' but the discussion here is largely neutral.

The analysis of Liberal Democrats is shown in the figure below. Again the concept of hung parliament comes through strongly, as does 'win' and other positive words such as 'support', 'genuine', 'alternative', 'agree', 'authoritative', and 'knowledgeable'. In general the words found in context with the Liberal Democrats are positive with not many negative words or concepts coming through strongly.

This is in contrast to the Conservatives, where we see a number of strongly negative words coming through, as can be seen in the figure below. This is to be expected given the demographic of the website.

We will continue this analysis by looking at the views of football fans from other demographics and examine the difference in opinion and popularity for the parties and the leaders that we find.